costuming for the discerning space kitten

I’ve had people ask me what happened, why I stopped cosplaying often, why I stopped attending cons outside of DragonCon. In some ways, it was just growing up, out of it, vacation days and funds put toward international travel, our priorities shift. If you’ve been at this hobby for 20 years and still enjoy it as much as you did, that’s fantastic. I hope it never loses its magic, but the sad truth is cosplay did lose it’s magic for me. We’ll call this addition to my Adventures in Costuming, ‘The End of Innocence’.

I’ve never told this story outside of a few close friends and even then I don’t know if I’ve ever fully gone into details. It’s been nearly a decade, so might as fucking well.

Let’s go back to the late summer of 2009. It was my first summer away from my hometown, in many ways I was still displaced, I had to drive 45 minutes north into Maryland to use my friend’s sewing room if I had any cosplay project I wanted to work on. Otakon had come and gone, an ambitious CLAMP Code Geass costume barely worn after I came down with a miserable cold the morning of the con. I was preparing for DragonCon, which has always been my con for ‘fun’ costumes. I was making another version of Vesper Lynd, we had joke Twilight drinking costumes where we doused ourselves in body glitter. Around this time my friend, Yaya Han, approached me about the newly announced Yume cosplay contest to be held at New York Anime Festival. The grand prize was an all expense paid trip to Tokyo for 5 days, $1000 in prize money.

I think I was honoured more than anything that a friend who I considered at the time to be infinitely better at cosplay than I ever would be wanted to do this together. I also accepted there would be some fallout, I’d have to be prepared for some minimal drama in the wake of competing regardless of whether we even placed or not. I remember my answer was not immediate, I took a day or two to decide if I was truly prepared to enter into a masquerade–despite having cosplayed since early 2004 at this point, I had never before competed outside of one hall cosplay contest.

We settled on Carmilla and Charlotte Elbourne from my favourite animated film, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, shared ideas via email as we were creating these costumes independently of one another. Yaya sent me matching gold fabric, cast my jewelry, we listened to various music tracks, plotted our skit that we would not have a chance to practice until the night before the competition.

I spent countless nights at my friend’s house 45 minutes north, weeknights, weekends, often out until 2 AM sewing, working, sometimes crying. I learned a lot making Charlotte because I couldn’t cut corners, I couldn’t make it look good simply by being a pretty girl in a fancy dress. It had to be perfect. I fixated on every seam, every stitch. Toward the end, I hoped for a catastrophe. I no longer wanted to go, no longer wanted to compete, it was as if I knew subconsciously that it would begin the rot that would eventually kill my love for cosplay.

I finished my costume two nights before we left. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best I could accomplish given my circumstances. Alex and I caught a bus up to New York City. I’d never been before, but this wasn’t the ideal first time visit to this city. We got in sometime around 8 PM, checked into the New Yorker Hotel, grabbed a quick dinner from the diner down the street. I barely ate anything, too nervous, too anxious.

That night Yaya and I put together our skit in the empty breakfast dining area of her hotel, which we’d gotten permission to use. I was in flats so I didn’t tower over Yaya, which made me inelegant. We practiced for an hour or so, recording our performance, rewatching, redoing.

The next morning we hurried over to judging. I felt unprepared, disconnected as I helped Yaya into Carmilla. I’m very bad at up-selling myself, and barely remember how judging went, only that we were surrounded by stunningly beautiful costumes from our competitors. The day wore on, we went into the masquerade hall and were given the opportunity to practice, to orient ourselves with the stage. At some point Alex and Brian brought us sodas and water while we waited for the masquerade to begin.

We cheered on those who performed before us. There were so many lovely costumes, choreography. I don’t remember if we were the last to go on stage, but if not, we were among the last competitors. Never an easy thing to do after you’ve seen everyone else. While we waited backstage, I remember posing for a few photos, and trying not to have a complete panic attack. Despite years of being a dancer, the older I got, the more anxious I became over performing in front of a crowd.

I was only minimally aware of our performance–later people would say I ‘looked like a bitch’ because I was concentrating. I remember laughing with relief when it ended, helping gather up Yaya’s massive train, and waving to the audience. In that moment, I had no idea we would win. As they called out the winners, Yaya and I held hands pretty much resigned to the fact that the competition was too amazing and we’d not even placed.

The winner of the Yume Grand Prize.

Our names were called. It became a flurry of congratulations, smiles, waving, thanking the judges. I never expected us to win.

Barely 5 minutes after we gave our final little interview in the masquerade hall, I called my dad to tell him of our win. Cosplay had always been a bit of something my parents didn’t understand, and I guess in that moment I thought maybe having won something would make it more meaningful. While talking to him, I heard another competitor ranting to anyone who would listen how he was robbed of the grand prize, he was in a giant Transformers costume, how dare we win simply because we were hot girls. It sort of took the joy out of the moment. Talk about shitty sportsmanship.

I went back to my hotel, changed. Alex and I once again went down to the diner, where I ate for the first time all day. The drama had already begun. I had barely had time to get back from the convention centre and changed before friends were texting me to tell me about what was being said online. Not about Yaya, but me. How I was undeserving of the award, how I’d only won because Yaya carried the team. People who were wrongly assumed to friends to complete strangers had some sort of negative opinion they needed to share. My costume wasn’t impressive enough, I’d not earned my right to win by having never competed before, my weight, my appearance, my ‘bitchface’, all my costumes ‘looked the same’–which, I do have a style, but really you fucks? I hadn’t even been able to celebrate and I was already being told by the internet to go kill myself because I’d won a fucking cosplay competition.

I had a person who I’d wrongly assumed was a friend tell people she made my costume, that I couldn’t sew. People believed her, not because she had proof but because they wanted something to validate their hate. While I had anticipated some drama, I never expected what followed. For the months that followed I had no idea who to trust. I avoided most people.

Every photo I posted, someone left at least one negative or backhanded comment. Some of these people still lurk around my social media accounts, liking my posts as if they didn’t do this shit nearly a decade before–cosplay.com has the fucking receipts. The only ally I truly had in the wake of this was Yaya who vehemently defended my costume and shut down anyone trying to negatively target me.

But you know, that truly killed something in cosplay for me. I’d barely even had time to process that something that I’d worked on as hard as I could had won this award, that I’d not failed my friend who’d relied on me to see this through along side her.

No, in retrospect, it wasn’t my best work, not by far. But it was, at that time. This was 2009, we weren’t doing flashy skits and massive builds, we were two women in gowns working with no props, no backdrop, competing against amazingly talented people. We edited our own music, choreographed our own skit, had sewn our costumes to match while 4 states away from one another.

I remember returning home not wanting to talk about our win, I wanted it behind me. I no longer cared. I came down with a terrible cold days later from the stress, bedridden for days with only the shitty comments, the anonymous messages, the bullshit and hate. People I’d never done anything to unfriended me on social media.

I wore the costume only once after our win for photos at AUSA, and sold it the following year. By the time we got to Japan the following March, my desire to cosplay has all but diminished. We took our prize money and extended our trip for 5 more days. I didn’t cosplay in Japan; I didn’t care that I didn’t cosplay in Japan. I spent my time exploring Tokyo, enjoying the company of my friends. And yes, most of my best work came after I made Charlotte, but I could never wear a costume for more than a few hours, I never felt comfortable cosplaying, I didn’t feel welcome at cons knowing what people had said. Jealousy is a fucking monster, and it ruined cosplay for me. I will never not love sewing, creating, costuming, but when people are like cosplay is for everyone and cosplay is fun and positive and welcoming, I’m like, sometimes, but it’s also a rancid rotting thing. I can’t say if it’s gotten better, worse, or simply stayed the same. I spent years trying to recapture that magic cosplay and cons once held, but sometimes the damage is too great.

I want to mention that winning that competition did nothing to advance me as a cosplayer. I was invited to judge one cosplay contest, a regional Yume qualifier at AUSA that same year. It would be the 2nd and final year that NYAF would hold the Yume competition before NYCC annexed NYAF. I didn’t get lavished with attention, I didn’t get invited to cons as a guest. Yes, at the time cons weren’t giving out large prizes like paid trips to Japan unless you were working for it like WCS, but it did nothing for me in the long term except make me realize how awful some people in this hobby can be. Maybe we weren’t as outspoken against internet bullying, maybe people weren’t as fucking ‘woke’.

But there you have it, why I don’t really care to cosplay that much any longer. Why I’m not excitedly awaiting Katsucon each year, or attending 7+ cons every season. And to those who know who they are, those people who pretended to be my friend and went immediately to shit on my win, I hope you guys never do it to another person. I hope you’ve learned, realized how shitty that behaviour is. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you are morally bankrupt people, but I’d hope nearly a decade later you’d know better or have better things to do with your lives.

Aside from cosplay and costuming, I have a love for fashion. Couture, vintage, small ateliers. I love fashion that speaks to me, that’s unique, a little out of the ordinary. Something that you show up in and people aren’t quite sure what to think. One of my favourite acquisitions came from Romanian fashion designer Liliana Turoiu.

July 2015 we visited Bucharest, Romania. Despite calling itself Paris of the East, I sadly was not terribly in love with Bucharest. Perhaps we stayed too far away from Old Town, or it was the time of year, the unfamiliarity of the city, as much as I desperately had wanted to adore Bucharest, the trip proved to be a bit trying. On our last full day in Romania we made plans to rent a car in the morning and drive up into Transylvania. I had heard of how beautiful the Southern Carpathians were, and had been wanting to see them since we’d arrived.

The landscape quickly changed. The flat plains and sunflower fields surrounding Bucharest gave way to winding mountain roads, small villages, misty peaks and valleys. What had been a very difficult holiday turned into something beautiful. While I’m not terribly fond of kitschy tourist destinations, I had wanted to visit Bran Castle despite the site having no true link to Vlad Tepes. The closer we got to Brasov the more beautiful the landscape became, and the greater the kitsch. We passed a sign emblazoned with the words ‘VAMPIRE CAMPING’, which I sadly didn’t get a photo with.

The shops surrounding the entrance to the castle grounds were predictably selling an assortment of the world’s very worst in Dracula kitsch. The line to enter the castle grounds seemed endless under the mid afternoon sun. Usually this is the point in which I retreat to the nearest bar and drink instead of withstanding the heat and crowds of people. However the part of me that loves most things vampires and has an undying love for Dracula won out, and I remained in line.

Romania isn’t particularly a popular holiday destination for Americans, and most of the people waiting along side me were either Romanian or German, and yes, regardless of nationality the majority of tourists are pushy and obnoxious, even though it did lend me the opportunity to see a Baby Bat with overdone winged eyeliner dressed head to toe in black in 95 degree weather sullenly leaving the castle with her father who assuredly had been dragged there by his goth daughter. She looked at me with my little bat hair clip and Black Milk Cathedral Leggings, and knew.

The line moved faster than anticipated and once we were able to leave the queue and enter the grounds, the entire feel of the place changed. It was no longer crowded, or filled with overwrought vampire kitsch. A steep climb up a stone pathway led to the castle and a breeze wafted across the peaks, off in the distance storm clouds rolled in.

The castle itself was itself uncrowded and brightly lit with its white plaster walls and open galleries. There was very little in way of mention of the fictional Dracula within the castle, one room dedicated to some ‘history’ of the castle, focusing on everything from Teutonic knights, to the 1992 film.

The thing that stood out to me the most was the Zestera exhibition by Bucharest fashion designer Liliana Turoiu.

I had dearly wanted to acquire something unique from Romania, and set out the following day to locate her boutique in Bucharest. Unfortunately, we were due to fly out to Istanbul that afternoon and the address I had for the boutique led to an empty store front. Several months went by before I finally contacted Liliana through her Facebook page, began a dialogue with her inquiring about the dresses that had been on display. I sent her a photo that I had snapped of the fashion exhibit, and a few days and 4609 lei later, I had acquired the dress.

A few weeks later, my friend Sam Seddon and I shot the dress outside a Baltimore church, with the creative direction of Danielle LaFleur.

I consider much of my childhood of very classical one, raised listening to Swan Lake, watching Masterpiece Theatre, being told fairy tales and operas by my mother. I knew the story of Aida at 4, my earliest idol was Cleopatra. I came to identify with the female character who chose death over disgrace. Possibly not the greatest role models for a young girl, and my feminist ideals are forever at odds with my adoration for tragic courtly love, the writings of Tennyson and art of the Pre-Raphalites, the Antigones, Aidas, Juliets taking their lives within the dim confines of a crypt.

We all have those films that made an impact on us as a child. I had those from the sci-fi classics that many of my friends grew up with, Star Trek, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, however some of the most influential films for me were the costumed dramas of the 1940s, 50s, & 60s. I remember watching the Taylor and Burton version of Cleopatra with my mother. Gone with the Wind, Camelot, but the film that always stood out the most to me was Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

Before the days of the play being the popular thing to hate on by thirty somethings who totally unabashedly loved the Luhrmann version when they were 12, or high schoolers forced to read it in ninth grade English, my mother introduced me to Romeo and Juliet. There was something about the vaguely claustrophobic nature of the play, the quiet isolation, two people thrown into a world of chaos and hatred finding sanctuary in one another.

I used to know the entire play line for line. I still know every line in the Zeffirelli film, which was dramatically cut. So when people want to repost memes about how it wasn’t a love story, it was about two teenagers who caused the deaths of seven people, signed anyone who read the play, keep posting your bitterness because it was assigned reading in high school English and you didn’t understand the language so you thought it would be cool later in life to deride it.

But they were two teenagers who killed themselves over a crush.

Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet as fated to be together, destined to fall in love despite all odds and to die in order to end the strife between their families. Whether or not their love was ‘true’ by conventional means is irrelevant. Like many stories and myths of love, it was something that was out of their control. So ‘love at first sight’ doesn’t exist. Then all the writings of the poets should be similarly derided. This one gets hated on because people think it makes them edgy, and we all love mocking teenagers, right, much like the older generation loves mocking Millennials.

It also gets rather victim blame-y, which makes me want to give all of the side-eye. Really? Let’s blame a pair of teenagers for a feud that the adults around them keep fueling.

All too often I see people want to place the blame on Romeo, as if he were single handedly responsible for the tragedy when all he ever wanted was to love and be loved in return. Perhaps it’s a fanciful aspiration, but in a world where there is so much hate, to want above all else to love, how can one belittle or demonize that?

He fucks up. Majorly. He is still only a teenager, rash and emotionally driven. And in those moments of irrationality and blind rage becomes an unwitting participant in the hatred already threatening to consume the love and peace he desires.

He has become the very thing that he detests.

We see a boy, who mere hours before was joyously in love, wishing for death. He accepts that his actions are unforgivable, and that in killing Tybalt he has effectively killed their future and any happiness they might have had together.

Only when he is assured that there is still hope to be found does he accept that there is reason yet to live.

He goes into exile with the promise that he will see Juliet again, that it will all work out for them in the end, that they need to wait, to be patient. No matter how implausible of a notion that might be, it is enough.

We’re witnessing someone who already was right on the cusp of despair loose everything that made life worth living in the span of mere days. The hopelessness of his existence, a boy in love, exiled from his home, haunted by the deaths of his dearest friend and his new wife’s cousin, brought from the brink of suicide by the faint hope that one day he might be able to openly love Juliet as his wife. And within moments the light of that hope is gone, and there is nothing but darkness.

There is no hesitation. No great soliloquy, only the resolve that he will go to her grave and die.

His method is one that is swift, easy. A quiet end. He does not choose a death that would be glorified, he is no Antony dying on his sword, or Tristan dying for the sake of his beloved, but rather one befitting someone tired, weary of the strife and misery that has stolen all of his hope.

It is once again claustrophobic, private, voyeuristic.

As a feminist don’t you think Juliet’s suicide is off-putting?

Juliet is a type of feminist. She is a girl who takes her fate into her own hands, she sees an unappealing future with a man twice her age, life as a countess, and wife to Paris, and says no. Juliet sees a boy who cares not for the wealth she is born into, and suddenly she has a way out, a say in her future, and instigates the idea of marriage. While Romeo pursues her initially, she is the driving force behind their relationship, the one calling the shots, setting the boundaries.

Juliet is written as the most mature, collected, and strongest of all the play’s characters. She is cunning, driven. Her undoing is when all her carefully calculated plans, her risks, her strength is for naught. She is not yet 14, widowed, her options are to leave and become a nun as there is no place for her left in this world, or to die. And while that in itself is very problematic, one must remember that this a girl living in the Renaissance, she has very little voice of her own, her role in society is to be pretty and talented and witty and demure, a lady of refinement with little agency. In the play her husband is dead and her unwanted betrothed has been killed. And so Juliet takes her own life.

It has always been telling to me that Shakespeare gave Juliet the ‘noble death’. Of all the play’s characters, Juliet dies a classical death. As the play’s bravest character, it is only befitting that her death is one that classically would have been considered the most honourable.

But the play romanticizes suicide.

I never saw their deaths as something to be envied. They were senseless, and avoidable. Something that could have been prevented if any of the adults around them had taken the time to have the same courage, compassion, or clarity that Juliet possessed. Throughout the play they are failed by those who they should have been able to rely on. Juliet’s Nurse betrays her trust the moment she fears she might be implicated in her involvement. Happy to play a role in their tryst until it became complicated. The same can be said of Friar Laurence abandoning Juliet in the crypt, unwilling to answer for his part once their plans were undone.

And so Juliet left alone, confused and heartbroken over why the boy she has given up everything to start a new life with is now dead, the finality of being confronted with the true end of all her hope and love and dreams, abandoned by all she trusted, she accepts that she will have the final say in her fate, and chooses death.

Their deaths were less about being unable to live without one another, and more that the only thing that was left that held meaning to them was suddenly, irrevocably taken away. There is a hopelessness there that anyone can experience. There is never a moment where they decide together that death is the answer. This is more of a modern misconception that they agree to some suicide pact in order to be united in death. They do not conspire to die to be together, they conspire to live together, they dream of a future that cannot ever be and then strive until the bitter end to make it work, that perhaps fate will finally be in their favour.

While the lovers do follow the more classical traditions of choosing death over the alternative–to quote Horatio, ‘I am more Roman than Dane.’–one must remember that our lovers were likely presumed to be Catholic, which would have made the prospect of them being reunited in death a rather uncertain thing. Where Juliet’s death is a sudden rash solution to an otherwise unappealing prospect, Romeo has hours to contemplate his demise, knowing full well the supposed sin of suicide, and still finds it a better alternative to living in a world without hope. Even in the crypt, Romeo questions his decision, distraught over his wife’s continued beauty in death, he is not enamoured with the idea of death, but believes that there is nothing left that is worth living for. If he is condemned to a life without love and hope, then he would rather risk the uncertainty of death.

The resulting peace is too little far, far too late. There is no salvation, no redemption, the surviving players are left with their guilt, their grief. There is finally peace, but at too great a price.

Why this essay on Romeo and Juliet? Because this play meant a great deal to me when I was younger, and even now, nearly 32, in a stable rather nonvolatile marriage, never having experienced the melodrama of young love, I still love it as much as I ever did.

It, along with a few other films, had a huge impact on me at an early age, helping instill my love for costuming, for history, for the arts.

We all have that thing that we have some inexplicable love for. I’m the person who has seen the story performed on stage in various settings, Prokofiev’s ballet, have tickets to Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette at The Met in January. This is my Phantom of the Opera.

As such, I had been planning for years now to recreate one of Juliet’s costumes. And while there is no age limit on cosplay, where Juliet is concerned, I fear I’m getting a bit too old to accurately portray a 14 year old girl as played by a 16 year old. When I made the decision to attend DragonCon this year I was trying to figure out what costumes I wanted to make with the limited time afforded me.

While my favourite of all the costumes Olivia Hussey wore as Juliet was the one she died in, the amount of detail work that would have required made it unfeasible with the given time constraints. The obvious choice was the dress worn during the ‘balcony scene’.

Arguably the least accurate of all the costumes worn by Olivia in the film, it has always been one of my favourites. I always figured it was supposed to be a type of undergarment, a 15th century negligee, but it was exquisite in its simplicity. We had only seen Juliet prior to this bedecked in yards of velvet.

There have been some exhibitions featuring the costumes from the Zeffirelli film–many which have faded over time–I have never seen this particular costume on display. Perhaps it went the way of the infamous Princess Leia costume, lost to someone’s attic after a mishap at a fancy dress party. This made determining the colour of the dress rather difficult. Given that the scene was shot at night, the colour ranges from ivory, to a pale golden colour, to a soft peach. The material is also a bit of mystery. It seems to be obviously silk, and to me has always looked like dupioni, but again given the lighting, the age of the film, and the lack of reference photos that one cannot be for certain. I ultimately decided on a dupioni silk in buttercreme from Silk Baron.

The bodice in the film is embroidered with a gold thread. Given that I wasn’t going to be hand embroidering anything that close to DragonCon, but needing the fabric to match up, I used a gold Alencon lace overlay.

The pattern for the bodice was extremely modified from an old Renaissance Faire wench costume pattern I had stashed away. The skirt was essentially 2.5 yards of fabric gathered into cartridge pleats and stitched onto the bodice. The dress laces up the back with hand bound eyelets and cord.

I sewed the entire costume in about 4 hours one Friday night.

Unbound Eyelets

Swarovski Crystals

Wanting to match all the tiny details, I accessorized with a vintage gold chain bracelet and made a gold leather and rhinestone headband using Swarovski crystals. The wig was ordered from Wig is Fashion and the hair line was plucked to remove the widow’s peak lest I look like Morticia Addams instead.

Realizing that I had around 2.5 weeks to work on costumes now that Juliet was finished, I began plotting to make Romeo for my friend and cosplay partner, Crystal.

Who wore it better, Leonard Whiting or my cat, Baldwin?

I want to make some minor alterations and adjustments on her costume before we wear these again–Costume College 2017 is 1960’s themed–as I bought cotton velvet for it on the Saturday afternoon 6 days before I flew out for DragonCon and drafted and sewed that entire costume in a few hours. It was acceptable for DragonCon, but I want it to be perfect before Costume College.

Now if only I didn’t feel like an old hag while wearing Juliet. I never realized how gaunt I was until I wore a long straight wig for a few hours.

I’m going to end this whole costuming blog post that turned into a dissertation on the play by mentioning that my favourite character is Tybalt.

Wait, what?

Yes, the Prince of Cats is my favourite Shakespearean character. Why? I relate to him. Most productions only portray Tybalt as the antagonist, the perpetrator of the violence that ultimately leads to everyone’s demise. However, Juliet’s Nurse refers to him as the best friend she had, so we’re only see a small aspect of his personality in the play. As someone whose default settings are either chill as all fuck or I will burn everything you love to the ground I sort of empathize with him. Maybe it’s just me. Fine.

I went through some of my earliest–see worst–cosplay earlier. Here’s the grim truth of my origins in glorious point & shoot photos. This is why I cannot take this hobby too seriously, no matter how much I’ve progressed over the past 13 years.

Every couple of months someone decides to post an article attempting to further the rift between an older generation of ‘costumers’ and people they perceive as fame hungry, Japanophiles who have so many resources from fabric, to themaplastics, and 3-D printers, to heaven forbid the internet full of screen shots and reference images, detailed exhibits and interviews with costumer designers wanting to share their technique and vision that they’re somehow cheating and ruining the costuming of yore.

Mermaid, Circa 1990

Melian & Luthien from The Silmarillion, Circa 2003

I’ve been at this hobby for a long while. Before I attended my first con, before I knew what cosplay even was, I had been making costumes, dressing up as my favourite characters. I’ve watched cosplay transform from being this secretive hobby that none of us wanted to admit we were taking time off from work to spend a weekend dressing up as fictional, to something that is so in the public eye that when I leave for DragonCon, my boss asks me for photos upon my return.

People look back on the past with nostalgia. I do it, we all do it. I look at the first cons I attended, the first costumes I wore, the way that I could stay in costume for 12 hours and found no discomfort in doing so. These days, I can barely keep a wig on for more than an hour before wanting to claw it off my head. That nostalgia will cloud your memories so you only focus on the good, but this hobby has always had its pettiness, its cattiness, the jealousy, those hungry for fame and happy to ruin the reputation of anyone in their way. While I wasn’t around 40 years ago to participate in costuming events, I can only imagine there was still jealousy and drama because no matter how things evolve people will always have the potential to be awful to one another.

While I do lament the loss of the magic that conventions once held for me when I was younger, I also accept that the hobby as a whole has evolved in ways that many of us could have never imagined. I walk into a con these days and see costuming and builds that are beyond movie quality, the amount of time and effort and passion that people put into what they create is astounding. And yes, you can say that cosplay–or costuming as it were–is being destroyed by those who are in it for fame, those buying likes on Facebook, and flooding their Instagram accounts with scantily clad photos and offering ‘premium content’ for Patreon contributors. However, it has always been an aspect of this hobby, and for every fame driven teenager posting photos of herself in a bra holding a PS4 controller, there are thousands of well adjusted individuals who are creating amazing costumes.

Photography by PhotoNinja.

There is this idea that unless you’re young and sexy then you’re going to be unwelcome in cosplay. I’m nearly 32, whatever ‘fame’ I ever had was only enough to have people spread unfounded rumours about me on internet forums a decade ago. I continue to sew costumes, and cosplay at conventions and events because I enjoy it, and if you look beyond the perceived fame, that’s what most of us are doing. We’re making costumes, like the ‘costumers’ of yore because we fucking enjoy doing it. I never made any monetary gains through cosplay, but it did introduce me to many of my friends, my husband, helped me with my own self confidence.

The hobby has evolved, and yes costuming has become more commonly termed cosplay. Does it truly matter in the end? I consider a lot of what I do ‘costuming’ but still am a cosplayer. Continuing to drive this rift over semantics is truly childish, it’s petty. Yes, educate people on the origins of cosplay, tell them about the early days of costume conventions, but in treating ‘cosplayers’ as some blight upon the costuming community at the end of the day makes you part of the problem.

I could never look at the things that people create in a derisive nature and say, ‘Well, back in my day this wouldn’t have been acceptable.’ Evolve, stop complaining, or step aside.

I was first introduced to Dragon’s Lair at a beach arcade. It was the summer of 1994. I was never very good at the game–seriously, play Dragon’s Lair, it is maddeningly frustrating to this day–but the ridiculousness of Princess Daphne’s character design always stayed with me.

Oh the early days of gaming, the sex farce damsels in distress in their Barbarella worthy attire. I don’t know what it was about Daphne that I always loved, probably the way she was floating around in that bubble in her luminous glittering caftan.

I first debuted this costume at DragonCon 2010 but was never particular happy with it, so I decided that I’d reprise it six years later.

The body suit is latex and was made by Collective Chaos. They do custom commissions, as well, for a fairly reasonable price, so if you ever need latex, hit them up. I did not go for a custom measured piece due to time constraints, however in retrospect I probably should have or at least sized down to an XS as the halter wasn’t as form fitting as it should have been.

The crown was made by Theater Didymus and attached to the headband with Worbla. That luminous glittering caftan was made from 4 yards of a black and silver lurex. The wig was an eBay find from when I cosplayed her in 2010.

A fun costume to wear, though I plan on altering the halter before I wear this again.

When I first saw the promotional video for Dark Souls 3 that featured the Fire Keeper, I was immediately intrigued. Upon release, I put off buying the game for a couple of weeks while I studied for a state exam that was crucial to my career, listening to my friends scream and curse their way through the game. When I finally did download the game onto Steam, I was almost immediately derailed by my sudden decision to make the Fire Keeper for AnimeNext. I had been selected to judge the performance portion of the World Cosplay Summit US Preliminaries and wanted to make a new costume for the event. I was also in the process of planning a trip to Jerusalem, and a short weekend trip, so my time was very limited. This costume would prove to be as maddeningly frustrating to complete as the Dark Souls 3 gameplay itself.

After some deliberation, I ordered ten yards of a charcoal grey polyester crepe from Mood Fabrics, a package that the USPS immediately delivered to the wrong address. My attempts to intercept it were in vain, and it was ultimately sent back to New Jersey before being redelivered to my address. This set my progress back by at least a week. A portion of the lace that I had ordered for the dress from China was marked as delivered to my address and promptly lost by the USPS.* All attempts to recover the package have failed. I reordered the same lace, paid for EMS shipping, and received the package only days before AnimeNext due to the seller charging me for EMS and sending the package standard.

Once the charcoal grey polyester fabric was delivered, I began drafting out the costume using a modified Butterick Pattern B4827. I had hoped that I would be able to manipulate the fabric to give it a heat distressed look, and was very successful in doing so by heating the fabric at high temperatures. The hemline of the skirt, cloak, and sleeves were all distressed in this manner. The costume was then airbrushed with various shades of browns and greys to give it a weather, singed, and ash covered appearance. It was perhaps the most fun I’ve had making a costume in years. The chance to make what would have been a beautiful medieval gown and turning it into something tattered and aged. The dress was worn over an altered bodysuit from We Love Colours and airbrushed with a faint lace pattern to replicate the in-game look. The arm wraps are suede lamb skin leather.

My favourite part of this costume is of course the mask.The base is a Worbla covered foam. Wanting to make the mask as intricate as possible, I used metal instead of Worlba to create the designs, and spray painted silver before giving it an aged patina with acrylics. The mask is inlaid with a Swarovski aquamarine crystal.

The wig is from Wig Is Fashion and was styled into a loose fishtail braid before being bound with leather.

I finished this costume almost a week prior to AnimeNext despite all the shipping setbacks and my own travel, making it one of the fastest costumes I’ve completed, and also one of my favourites. While I was only able to wear it around the convention centre for about an hour before I was called into judging, it was pleasantly very well received from a large number of Dark Souls fans, many who asked it they could level up, went through the motions when taking photos, and I was even chased up the escalator by a very charming Solaire cosplayer for a photo. Praise the Sun.

* 3 months later we hear a knock at our front door around 11 PM on a Friday night. My husband goes to answer it and there waiting on our doorstep are the two lost packages which had been misdelivered back in late April to the wrong address. I can only figure that they were placed in a vacant mailbox and when the new tenants moved into our building they were kind enough to finally deliver them to our address.